Well, fuck.

And that concludes my 2020 Year In Review.

To be fair, it wasn't all bad – like Cris Derksen says, "I had a good day, followed by a bad week." And it was the year that I found Derksen's music, making her my new favourite cellist. (With apologies to Layla McCalla, whose Vari-Colored Songs is an amazing album, and who was an absolute star when I saw her on tour with the Drops way back when.) I also started reading more fiction, largely as a way to redirect energy from social media, and found a couple of great series. I've probably read the Murderbot Diaries books twenty or thirty times, between the five of them. By far my favourite protagonist – one I can really relate to after years of working in retail. And American Hippo by Sarah Gailey was weird and memorable. So some solid wins there.

There were photographic high points for me as well. I'm happy with how my Convolution series is turning out, and that will continue for a while. And I'm pleased that I started 2020 longing for an absurdly expensive film camera, only to have that mostly expunged when my most interesting (to me, at least, as Drew correctly pointed out) work comes out of a $99 plastic toy. I disagree that "The Camera Doesn't Matter", despite that truism being repeated by every photographer who can easily put their hands on over ten thousand dollars worth of gear, so it's nice to have that cliché disproven by the third-cheapest camera in the house.

I've also hit the milestone of learning how to develop my own black and white film, which is a bit of a leap considering that this time last year I was wondering if film photography could possibly be for me. Now I can spot the difference between negatives developed in TMax (at the lab), Microphen (what I usually use) and Perceptol (special occasions, of which there are too few). I have boxes and boxes of these powder developers squirrelled away, along with lots of film. Large amounts of Ortho, Acros, and HP5 mostly, but a roll or two of many other varieties as well.

Now all I need is something interesting to use it on, but that's always been the challenge.